Shakeup at the Lucas Museum
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| Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, under construction |
A brief statement on the website of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art announces that director and CEO Sandra Jackson-Dumont is stepping down, effective April 1, 2025. "Sandra's decision to move on from the role was based on a new organizational design to split the current role into two positions." George Lucas will be responsible for "content direction"—apparently, deciding what the museum will exhibit. Jim Gianopulos, former CEO of 20th Century Fox and Paramount, will be acting CEO as a search commences for a permanent replacement.
The Lucas Museum's first director was Don Bacigalupi, formerly of the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. In 2019 he was replaced by Jackson-Dumont, who had worked at the Metropolitan Museum. The upshot is that, as LMNA gears up for its opening, management has shifted from museum professionals to two guys with successful careers in the movie business.
It's not easy for an outsider to evaluate Jackson-Dumont's contribution to an institution that has yet to open its doors. Based on a handful of press releases and news coverage, Jackson-Dumont oversaw the expansion and broadening of George Lucas' quirky personal collection, heavy in Norman Rockwell and memorabilia of his own films. Under Jackson-Dumont's direction, the museum acquired material relating to political cartoons, comic strips and books, magazine illustration, and graphic novels; documentary photography; the Separate Cinema Archive (37,000 objects documenting African-American cinema); a miscellany of high-profile paintings, including a brilliant Frida Kahlo Self-Portrait, Robert Colescott's George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware, and works attributed to Cranach, Artemisia Gentileschi, Gericault, and Jacob Lawrence.
Lucas and/or wife Mellody Hobson endorsed these acquisitions with their checkbook. But the split management arrangement suggests that Lucas' and Jackson-Dumont's visions for the museum weren't in perfect alignment.
The Lucas Museum is expected to open in 2026.
Comments
As for Jackson-Dumont, I imagine she was too much into the politics, less so into the art, figurative or otherwise. Politics have also affected the cultural world, particularly in the entertainment industry. Lucas's own original franchise of Star Wars has dropped out of the zeitgeist. The Lucas museum hopefully will steer clear of downer economics and killjoy ideology.
> AI, I swear!
Life imitating art (or AI). LOL. In turn, I've seen AI videos that are so convincing, I'd swear they're really the actual person doing or saying something ridiculous or out of character. The culture, economics and politics are becoming more and more Orwellian: Brave new world.
As for George Lucas, the LA Times' art critic a few years ago described the artworks of the Lucas museum as "treacle." He also in 2023 discounted LACMA as a "...de facto museum of contemporary art, but frankly...not a very good one." I get what he means, since both viewpoints do have merit. But I feel tougher towards LACMA than the upcoming Lucas. That's partly because the publicly owned museum built in 1965 has a lengthy track record while the privately owned Lucas has yet to open.
Both a variety of contemporary art and also a lot of pre-Raphealite-type works do make me wince. It will be interesting to see how the Lucas either deals with or doesn't deal with two opposing styles in the world of art. At the same time, I wonder if Jackson-Dumont spent too much time filtering and judging display objects based on the context of race, gender, sexuality, history, nationality and politics.